January 27, 2006
Sam the Man Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:45 PM EST The other day I was looking for a quote by Samuel Eliot Morison. In it he was discussing the Salem witchcraft frenzy of 1692, and as I recalled he said something like, “There are few sections of the historical literature more tedious than those that show how every responsible citizen of the seventeenth century believed wholeheartedly in witchcraft.” I wanted it for an item about the Supreme Court, believe it or not. I was going to introduce the topic by saying that in similar fashion, I’m sure we are all bored to tears at being told over and over that Supreme Court selections have always been political, so I won’t bore you with that. Then I would go on to say that we might as well be open about it instead of pretending, and the more political the confirmation process the less political the court, and so on. But you’ve heard all that too, so I’ll spare you. Anyway, I couldn’t find the quote. In fact, in the witchcraft section of the book I was looking for (The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England, 1964), Morison includes just such a passage himself, so I must have been thinking of some other historian. But Morison is always interesting to read, and I was amused to encounter, after he tells how the Salem episode began with a small group of girls who started twitching and shrieking, the following: “At this point a good spanking administered to the younger girls, and lovers provided for the older ones, might have stopped the whole thing.” True, perhaps, though depending on the quality of the lovers, it might simply have stimulated more such outbursts. But it made me reflect that you don’t see many serious historians writing sentences like that today. Whether that’s good or bad, I leave to others to decide. On the other hand, you do see serious historians writing passages like this: “Hence [here Morison is paraphrasing the historian J. G. Palfrey], many people who knew perfectly well that the court was condemning innocent people held their tongues, lest they bring the judges and the government into contempt. How true that analysis is, and how it recalls the actions of wise and good people in the same commonwealth, in the Sacco and Vanzetti case!” The only trouble with Morison’s remark is that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. Even a hack propagandist like Upton Sinclair knew that, or at least had very serious doubts—though, in a mirror image of what Palfrey wrote, Sinclair held his tongue because he did want to bring the judges and the government into contempt (see this which is mildly corrected by this). Indeed, from Sacco and Vanzetti to the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss and on to today’s celebrity Death Row murderers, “wise and good people” have been glorifying, excusing, and covering up for politically sympathetic criminals for generations. That’s a mass delusion that has lasted much longer than the Salem tragedy—and will take a lot more than spanking and lovers to correct.
January 27, 2006
Da Ponte Addenda Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:10 AM EST Two small additions to the extraordinary life of Lorenzo da Ponte:
1) He was the first librettist in history not to labor in utter obscurity, and for a hundred years the only one. Even today the writers of opera librettos are, at most, a footnote in the theater program. The reason, I suppose, is that in opera the words don’t much matter, as it’s nearly impossible to understand them even if you speak the language the opera is sung in. Only when Gilbert and Sullivan began to write operettas where the words were every bit as important as the music did the book writer and lyricist (Gilbert) get equal billing with the composer. 2) Lorenzo da Ponte had his portrait painted after he moved to America. The artist? Samuel F. B. Morse.
January 27, 2006
Mozart in America . . . or the Next Best Thing Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 07:15 AM EST Today is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 250th birthday. That may not be the anniversary to make the most of on AmericanHeritage.com—but remember Lorenzo da Ponte. Lorenzo da Ponte was the librettist—meaning he wrote the book and lyrics—for Mozart’s three surpassingly great Italian operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. He was born a Jew, ordained a Catholic priest, a poet, an adventurer, and notorious as a womanizer. In fact, he was not only a famous libertine in his own right but a good friend of Giacomo Casanova, which made him uniquely qualified to write the libretto for Don Giovanni, the tale of the downfall of Don Juan. He was also a greengrocer and deliveryman in America. In 1805, when he was 56 (and 14 years after Mozart’s death), da Ponte fled his European creditors by boarding a ship to the United States, where he had already sent his wife and children. Finding in New York a city with no opera and almost no literary community, he set up as a grocer, first in New York and then in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. After a while he started what he called the Academy for Young Gentlemen, to give lessons in Italian and other languages. In 1811 he moved to the Pennsylvania countryside to be near his in-laws. The once glamorous ex-Venetian had a hard time figuring out what to do with himself. He became a grocer again; he opened a millinery store in Philadelphia; he started a distillery; he drove a delivery truck. By 1819 he was back in New York. With his wife, he opened Ann da Ponte’s Boarding House. In 1823 he began publishing his memoirs, letting people who had seen him driving a truck or selling vegetables know that he had once been things like Poet to the Imperial Theatres in Vienna and a friend of the emperor’s. In 1825—he was 76—he became the first professor of Italian at Columbia College. In 1826 he got to see his immortal creation Don Giovanni performed in America for the first time. In 1833 he spearheaded an effort to build a house for Italian opera in New York; it opened that November, with him as co-manager. The opera house did not prosper. In 1835 da Ponte wrote, “I, the creator of the Italian language in America, the teacher of more than two thousand persons whose progress astounded Italy! I, the poet of Joseph II, the author of thirty-six dramas, the inspiration of Salieri, of Weigl, of Martin, of Winter, and Mozart! After twenty-seven years of hard labor, I have no longer a pupil! Nearly ninety years old, I have no more bread in America!” In August 1838 he died, 89 and sharp as a tack until his very last days.
January 26, 2006
A Nice Pair of Heels Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:00 PM EST Going through boxes of books from your past is like copying over an old address book: You happily rediscover some old friends and just as happily delete others. I have recently had this experience at home and at work. In both places, the acquisition of bookshelves has permitted me to take hundreds of books out of “storage” (a polite term, in most cases, for “unruly heaps”) and sort through them. The result was two large stacks of books that I want to read again but probably won’t, and two somewhat smaller stacks that either went to a local used-book store or were left on the sidewalk in front of my building (and ended up, within a few days, being sold from card tables on Broadway). One book I was pleased to revisit was Only in America (1958), by Harry Golden. The author was a Jew from New York City who settled in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1941 and began publishing a newspaper called the North Carolina Israelite. It was that era’s equivalent of a blog, filled with Golden’s miscellaneous thoughts on a wide range of matters, from segregation and racism to the oddities of human behavior to reminiscences of his Lower East Side childhood. One item in the book that has particular relevance for us at American Heritage is titled “How to hire a stenographer.” The item tells how Golden advertised for a stenographer and spotted, among the résumés he received, one from a woman named Carrie Ferrara. “Ferrara? In Charlotte there’s a Ferrara?” he writes. “I immediately put all the other letters to one side and decided to hire Miss Ferrara sight unseen.” Her very last name inspires Golden to thoughts of the Duke of Naxos, Princess Leonora, and “that great city of culture, art, good wine, and beautiful women.” And of course she turns out be a first-rate stenographer. Golden goes on to explain how such a fish-out-of-water situation happened: The stenographer’s brother had been stationed at an Army camp in North Carolina during the war. He married a Charlotte girl and stayed in the area, and Carrie followed him down from the North a few years later. Golden proclaims this unusual move as “a good thing for Charlotte and for the State of North Carolina . . . a few more ‘Ferraras’ and eventually Charlotte, too, will be enriched with a substantial community of these people who have given so much to the world . . . If there is any truth to what the philosophers say, that the Jews represent ‘the salt in the stew of civilization,’ it certainly follows that the Italians supply the bits of ‘red pepper’ and the dash of ‘paprika’ which help make the whole concoction more delightful.” The time is long past, of course, when anyone would raise an eyebrow at finding an Italian surname in North Carolina, or anywhere else in the United States. In fact, not long ago American Heritage hired a young Italian-American woman from North Carolina as an editorial assistant. Ms. Armaleo did an excellent job in the too-brief time she worked for us before moving on to better things. Shortly after she left, we hired another editorial assistant from North Carolina, also highly capable. This one would have surprised Harry Golden even more: Her last name is Cheng. Meanwhile, as I sorted through my office books, I came across a copy of Inside U.S.A. (1947), by John Gunther. This book created quite a stir when it came out and was even somehow made into a Broadway musical; my copy is from a 1997 reissue. Gunther, a Chicagoan by birth, was a world-traveling journalist who had spent several years, starting during the war, visiting all 48 states and noting what he heard and saw. He is also remembered for writing Death Be Not Proud (1949), about his young son’s unsuccessful struggle with cancer. When his tour of America reaches the South, Gunther writes: “The foreign-born and sons of foreign-born . . . now leave our story to all practical intent . . . in every [Southern] state except Florida and Louisiana 90 percent or more of the white citizens come of parents who were both American born. The figure reaches 98.7 percent in Arkansas, if Arkansas statistics are to be believed. That Arkansas should also be one of the most unquestionably backward of American states naturally gives the observer slight pause, and makes one wonder what peculiar characteristics the Celts and Gaels, when transported, contribute to a civilization.” Gunther’s sniffiness and Golden’s giddiness aside, it’s clear that the South has benefited enormously from the changes that have taken place in America since these two men published their books. As late as the 1960s, if you weren’t from the South there really wasn’t much reason to go there. Now there is; a good slogan might be “The New South—All the Weather, None of the Faulkner!” In fact, as my fellow blogger Joshua Zeitz wrote in our pages recently, the South not only has flourished at home but has come to dominate large sectors of the entire country’s culture, politics, and religion. You might say it took Martin Luther King to give Jefferson Davis his revenge. There are many reasons behind this change. The civil rights revolution was a big one, of course, and then there’s air conditioning, the mechanization of agriculture, advances in communications and transportation, the relaxation of immigration controls, the establishment of a working two-party system, and many others. Bluenecks may grumble about the red states’ disproportionate influence, but on the whole, there can be no doubt that the entire country is better off since the South made its great change. It’s the same old story of free trade, this time in culture. When the South was insular and hostile to outsiders, its potential was stunted. But when it opened itself up, willingly or not, the region’s natural charms and advantages attracted a whole new crowd of people, including many descendants of those who had fled the South in the old days. Cultural protectionism not only shuts off those on the inside from beneficial influences; it keeps those on the outside from finding out what they’re missing. And in the end, that means everyone loses out.
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